Architectural 3D rendering
in Boston

Ask how the studio prepares for a historic district commission. A hearing turns on details — window muntins, cornice lines, mortar color — seen from the public way, so the proposal should be rendered at eye height with those details modeled as drawn, beside the existing condition from the same position.

Ask how it renders brick. Historic Boston brick runs from deep red to near-brown within one wall, with mortar joints that catch the light, and the bays and cornices of a Back Bay street are made by shadow; a uniform texture in flat light reads as new construction.

Check what is fixed before you commit: the views, the rounds of revisions, the delivery date, and whether the existing condition and the proposal are rendered from the same viewpoints. Every Boston quote we send records all of that, and a single senior artist sees the project through to the final frame.

Context and detail are the biggest variables. A rowhouse roof deck or rear addition needs the neighboring facades modeled from photography; a lab building in the Seaport or Kendall Square needs accurate daylit interiors and an arrival sequence for tenants who compare floor plates.

Neighborhood infill is usually answered by one honest street view of the new building among three-story wood houses, made from the same model as the rest of the set. Each further view from the existing scene costs a fraction of the first.

Boston projects are priced in full before work starts, typically by the next business morning; registered businesses pay nothing up front.

Boston’s Landmarks Commission and its ten historic district commissions use one design review application, and the guide to it asks every applicant to show what the building will look like when the work is complete, in drawings or other visual documentation. Current, high-quality color photographs of existing conditions are required for all applications, from the whole facade and the roof to abutting buildings where they are affected, and screenshots from Google Street View or other online mapping services are not permitted.

Rooftop work has its own list. For roof decks, additions, elevator headhouses and rooftop equipment, the guide asks for color photographs of the existing roof and of a rooftop mock-up, existing and proposed roof plans, full sightline section drawings, and full elevation drawings showing context, with a block plan. The mock-up, at the proposed height and volume, is required to determine visibility before approval and is photographed from the roof and from the ground. For major construction, an informal advisory presentation of preliminary concepts may be helpful before filing.

Renderings sit beside that evidence rather than replacing it; the mock-up is still built and photographed. We model the proposal from the roof plans and sightline sections, render it into current photographs of the street rather than map screenshots, and match the cameras to the points the mock-up was photographed from, with the existing view beside each one. For an advisory presentation, the same model can show early massing in its block before the design is fixed. Our guide to renderings for a historic district review covers the views and the before-and-after pairs in more detail.